Thursday, February 9, 2012

The Google Apps Script team strives to achieve a very high level of responsiveness to our community. We iterate fast to deliver new features and functionality. Releasing new Apps Script services under the “Experimental” flag allows us to gather valuable feedback from you. Real world exposure to these new experimental Apps Script services makes it easy for us to prioritize features, improve API design and documentation, and identify bugs and use cases. On top of that, experimental releases give us a way to support our more advanced users, who are perfectly happy to live on the cutting edge and get their hands on cool new Apps Script services as early as possible.

We put thorough consideration into the use of the Experimental flag. Not every new Apps Script service that we launch is experimental. In October, we launched the Lock and Cache service as non-experimental. We believed that these two services were fundamentally mature, and thus able to be launched as non-experimental.

You can expect us to continue on this path of careful deliberation in deciding when to use the experimental flag. We will continue to evaluate the design, documentation, and overall strengths of each experimental API and continue to work hard to graduate them to fully supported APIs. We welcome your feedback in helping us make Apps Script better. You can post your feature requests on our tracker and ask any question in our forum. If you are curious on how to use the above mentioned APIs then check out the tutorials for the Charts and Gmail Services, the Maps Service and excellent example of using Properties Service.

Saurabh is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He works closely with Google Apps Script developers to help them extend Google Apps. Over the last 10 years, he has worked in the financial services industry in different roles. His current mission is to bring automation and collaboration to Google Apps users.